Fau Pulls Out The Stops With Its `Hello, Dolly!`

The production also coincides with the 25th anniversary of the show, which ran on Broadway for 2,844 performances from 1964 to 1970, and won the Tony Award.

``We`ve pulled out all the stops for this one,`` said director Joe Conaway, who directed the university`s first show, Last Letters From Stalingrad, in October 1964. ``I would say this is the most lavish of all the musicals we`ve ever done, and we`ve done quite a few of them.``

Based on Thornton Wilder`s play The Matchmaker, the turn-of-the-century tale centers around Dolly Gallagher Levi, a New York widow, who is a matchmaker engaged to find a mate for Horace Vandergelder, a tight-fisted, pompous Yonkers merchant. While pretending to find him a wife, she sets out to snare Vandergelder for herself.

Local favorite Melissa Hart plays Dolly, as her graduate-production project toward earning a master of fine arts degree in theater. Winner of three Carbonell Awards from the South Florida Entertainment Writers Association and a 1970 Tony Award nominee for Georgy, Hart last worked with Conaway in the university`s 1981 summer repertory production of The Glass Menagerie.

Although Ethel Merman, Pearl Bailey, Mary Martin and Ginger Rogers are among those who have played Dolly, Carol Channing, who starred in the original production, is most closely identified with the role.

``Whenever you have a role people associate with a particular person,`` Hart said, ``you must approach it freshly. I don`t think I do it like anybody else has.``

Other main cast members are Tim Flay and James Graham as Vandergelder`s oppressed clerks, Cornelius Hackl and Barnaby Tucker; Kim Ehly as the lovely Mrs. Molloy; and Tracey Clahan as the riotous floozy Ernestina Money.

Beverly Thomas` colorful period costumes and Rex Fluty`s imaginative sets -- complete with a horse-drawn taxi and a train with a working smokestack -- evoke the atmosphere of an old New York washed in wistful sentiment.

The elaborate depiction of the uptown Harmonia Gardens Restaurant, where Dolly makes her legendary entrance to the show`s title song, and the clever transformation of Mrs. Molloy`s hat shop from its exterior to its interior setting won bursts of applause from an appreciative opening-night audience.

``Today, when musicals are really what keeps the theater alive,`` Hart said, ``it`s exciting that the university is able to present such a large and professional production.``

-- Hello, Dolly! plays at 8 tonight and Saturday and at 2 p.m. on Sunday at the Griswold University Theatre on the campus of Florida Atlantic University, Glades Road, Boca Raton. Tickets are $18 for adults and $9 for children younger than 12, and may be purchased at the box office. Call 367-3808.